Great Expectations: Benchmarking the Real-World Performance of RVV 1.0 in HPC

Abstract

Following the ratification of the RISC-V Vector Extension (RVV 1.0), new commercially available silicon has been adopting the extension. This paper revisits the question of RISC-V viability for High-Performance-Computing (HPC) by benchmarking the latest RVV 1.0-capable hardware (SiFive X280 (Tenstorrent Blackhole), SpacemiT X60 (K1) and X100/A100 (K3), and T-Head C920v2 (Sophon SG2044)). We assess these platforms using standard HPC benchmarks (BLAS, FFTW, HPL, HPCG) and synthetic workloads (STREAM, FMA throughput) and compare them to a state-of-the-art HPC ARM64 chip (NVIDIA Grace). Our findings show that while RVV 1.0 delivers significant performance improvements over scalar execution, hardware-specific implementation challenges remain. We detail these performance characteristics and discuss the remaining hurdles for RISC-V, including RVV, to become a mainstay in the HPC landscape.